Name:______
Ms. Swanson
English 9, Per. 6, 7
Spring 2015
Racial Profiling Unit
Due Dates:
Activity 1 (in class) Tu 1/6-We 1/7
Activity 2 (in class) Tu 1/6-We 1/7
Activity 3 (in class) Tu 1/6-We 1/7
Activity 4 (in class) Tu 1/6-We 1/7
Activity 5 (in class) Th 1/8-Fr 1/9
Activity 6 (in class) Th 1/8-Fr 1/9
Activity 7 (in class) Th 1/8-Fr 1/9
Activity 8 (in class) Th 1/8-Fr 1/9
Activity 9 HW for
Activity 10 (in class)
Activity 11(in class)
SEE OTHER ASSIGNMENT SHEET: Racial Profiling Writing Assignment
Activity 1: Getting Ready to Read: Quickwrite
The following article, “Jim Crow Policing” by Bob Herbert, was first published in the New York Times on February 2, 2010. It tries to persuade its readers that law-enforcement agents should not take any action on the basis of race alone. It uses a combination of logic and emotion to achieve its purpose. Have you ever been stopped by the police because of your appearance? If you have, what was your reaction? If you haven’t, what do you think your reaction would be? Why do you think you would react this way?
Quickwrite: What do you know about racial profiling? What do you think about it? Write for five minutes. Then discuss your response with a partner.
Activity 2A: Exploring Key Concepts: Questions
Understanding key concepts in a reading selection is essential to good comprehension, so that is where we are going to start the reading process. Complete the following activities before moving on.
Look up “Jim Crow” on the Internet.
- What does the term have to do with race?
- Is the reference positive or negative?
- What is its origin?
- What do you think this reference might have to do with police activities?
- Now go to the PBS page called “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow,” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories.html
and read four of the Jim Crow stories under “Personal Narratives”. Be prepared to retell one of them to the class.
Activity 2B Key Concepts: Vocabulary
Below are some important concepts from Herbert’s essay. Write down a clear definition for each of these terms.
· Race
· racism
· prejudice
· prejudiced
· discrimination
· ethnic
· profiling
· stereotyping
Activity 3: Surveying the Text
Surveying your reading material (no matter what its length) will give you an overview of what it is about and how it is put together. To learn how to survey an essay, answer the following questions.
1. Who is the author of this essay?
2. When and where was this essay published?
3. What proper nouns do you notice in this essay?
4. What do you think the essay will discuss?
Activity 4: Making Predictions and Asking Questions
Making predictions about your reading will help you read actively rather than passively. Active reading promotes learning. Your answers to the following questions will guide you through the process.
1. What do you think this essay is going to be about?
2. What do you think is the purpose of this essay?
3. Who do you think is the intended audience for this piece? What brings you to this conclusion?
4. What do you think the writer wants the reader to do or believe?
5. On the basis of the title and other features of the selection, what information or ideas might this essay present?
6. Do you think the writer will be negative or positive in relation to the topic? How did you come to this conclusion?
7. What argument about the topic might the article present? What makes you think so?
8. Turn the title into a question (or questions) for you to answer after you have read the essay.
Activity 5: Understanding Key Vocabulary
The following vocabulary words are important to your understanding
of this essay, so the definitions are provided for you:
• abomination (par. 1): an object that is intensely disliked
• contraband (par. 3): illegal imports
• despicable (par. 5): horrible
• degrading (par. 8): humiliating
• unconstitutional (par. 13): illegal
• specious (par. 15): false
Explain how each of these words is related to one of the key concepts introduced earlier in “Exploring Key Concepts.”
Activity 6: Reading for Understanding
We all process reading material differently. No one way is better than another. To demonstrate the variety of approaches to this essay, read it aloud, and talk about your responses to the following questions:
1. Which of your predictions turned out to be true?
2. What surprised you?
3. Are you persuaded by the text?
4. If a prediction was inaccurate, what in the text misled you?
5. Can you answer the question you created from the title?
6. What in the essay is confusing to you?
Activity 7: Considering the Structure of the Text
Learning more about the structure of the text will give you a better understanding of the writer’s approach to its content. Your work on this activity will help you understand the text’s structure as you apply it to your own writing.
Descriptive Outlining:
• Draw a line across the page where the introduction ends.
• Draw a line across the page where the conclusion begins.
• Draw lines throughout the body of the text that break the text into meaningful segments.
• Then, for each of your segments, label in the left margin the topic of each one.
Activity 8: Rereading the Text
As you read the essay again, do the following tasks:
· Record the essay’s thesis.
· State the thesis as a question.
· Highlight the details throughout the essay that directly answer the question you have written.
· Label the following in the left hand margin of your copy of the essay:
Introduction
The Issue or Problem
Examples
Main Arguments
Conclusion
· In the right-hand margin, write your reactions to what the author is saying.
Activity 9: Summarizing and Responding
Complete both of the activities below to make sure you understand how to summarize effectively.
Summarizing: The act of summarizing asks you to put someone else’s ideas into your own words, which will improve your understanding of those ideas.
- Using your previous notes and annotations, work in groups of three or four to summarize the essay’s main points in no more than five sentences.
- Then generate five questions that might serve as the basis of a class discussion. Use at least five vocabulary words from this module in your summary.
Activity 10: Thinking Critically—Logos, Ethos, Pathos
The following questions and activities will help you gain a deeper understanding of the Herbert essay. Answer the following questions as thoroughly as you can, choosing evidence from the reading selection to support your answer.
Questions about Logic (Logos)
1. What are two major claims the author makes in this essay?
2. What support does the author provide for these assertions?
3. Can you think of counterarguments the author does not deal with?
4. Do you think the author has left something out on purpose? Why?
Questions about the Writer (Ethos)
1. Does this author have the right background to speak with authority on this subject?
2. Is this author knowledgeable? Smart? Successful?
3. What does the author’s style and language tell you about him?
4. Do you trust this author? Why or why not?
5. Do you think this author is deceptive? Why or why not?
6. Do you think this author is serious? Explain your answer.
Questions about Emotions (Pathos)
1. Does this piece affect you emotionally? Which parts?
2. Do you think the author is trying to manipulate readers’ emotions? How?
3. Do your emotions conflict with your logical interpretation of the arguments?
4. Does the author use humor? How does that affect your acceptance of the author’s ideas?
“Jim Crow Policing”
By Bob Herbert
New York Times, Op-Ed piece, February 1, 2010
The New York City Police Department needs to be restrained. The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. That many of the officers engaged in the mistreatment are black or Latino themselves is shameful.
Statistics will be out shortly about the total number of people who were stopped and frisked by the police in 2009. We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.
An overwhelming 84 percent of the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 were of black or Hispanic New Yorkers. It is incredible how few of the stops yielded any law enforcement benefit. Contraband, which usually means drugs, was found in only 1.6 percent of the stops of black New Yorkers. For Hispanics, it was just 1.5 percent. For whites, who are stopped far less frequently, contraband was found 2.2 percent of the time.
The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason.
Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable, racially oriented tool of harassment. And the police are using it at the increasingly enthusiastic direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
There were more than a half-million stops in New York City in 2008, and when the final tally is in, we’ll find that the number only increased in 2009.
Not everyone who is stopped is frisked. When broken down by ethnic group, the percentages do not at first seem so wildly disproportionate. Some 59.4 percent of all Hispanics who were stopped were also frisked, as were 56.6 percent of blacks, and 46 percent of whites. But keep in mind, whites composed fewer than 16 percent of the people stopped in the first place.
These encounters with the police are degrading and often frightening, and the real number of people harassed is undoubtedly higher than the numbers reported by the police. Often the cops will stop, frisk and sometimes taunt people who are at their mercy, and then move on — without finding anything, making an arrest, or recording the encounter as they are supposed to.
Even the official reasons given by the police for the stops are laughably bogus. People are stopped for allegedly making “furtive movements,” for wearing clothes “commonly used in a crime,” and, of course, for the “suspicious bulge.” My wallet, my notebook and my cellphone would all apply.
The police say they also stop people for wearing “inappropriate attire for the season.” I saw a guy on the Upper West Side wearing shorts and sandals a couple weeks ago. That was certainly unusual attire for the middle of January, but it didn’t cross my mind that he should be accosted by the police.
The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the Police Department over the stops. Several plaintiffs detailed how their ordinary daily lives were interrupted by cops bent on harassment for no good reason. Lalit Carson was stopped while on a lunch break from his job as a teaching assistant at a charter school in the Bronx. Deon Dennis was stopped and searched while standing outside the apartment building in which he lives in Harlem. The police arrested him, allegedly because of an outstanding warrant. He was held for several hours then released. There was no outstanding warrant.
There are endless instances of this kind of madness. People going about their daily business, bothering no one, are menaced out of the blue by the police, forced to spread themselves face down in the street, or plaster themselves against a wall, or bend over the hood of a car, to be searched. People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct.
The Police Department insists that these stops of innocent people — which are unconstitutional, by the way — help fight crime. And they insist that the policy is not racist.
Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for Commissioner Kelly, described the stops as “life-saving.” And he has said repeatedly that the racial makeup of the people stopped and frisked is proportionally similar to the racial makeup of people committing crimes.
That is an amazingly specious argument. The fact that a certain percentage of criminals may be black or Hispanic is no reason for the police to harass individuals from those groups when there is no indication whatsoever that they have done anything wrong.
It’s time to put an end to Jim Crow policing in New York City.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 2, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition of the New York Times.